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On second thought, we don't even need to invoke forked universes. The Anthropic Principle alone could explain our apparent luck. If we didn't get "lucky", most or all of us simply wouldn't be here to ponder our good fortune.

Just as history is written by the victors, it's also written by survivors. Corpses don't ponder their existence and don't write.

Side note: here's a list of 20 alleged near misses:

http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/k...

I miss the Cold War, when there were competing systems instead of a race to the bottom.

I'm uncertain if you meant your statement in jest. If so, jolly good. If not....... Really, do you comprehend how many times the world nearly experienced total ecological collapse due to nuclear winter? Nuclear Near Misses

When the U.S. installed one of the first Radar stations to catch Russian missiles as they came over the hemisphere. The Moon set off one of the first alerts, was a tad too sensitive.

Best cite I can come up with; but a common snicker when I was growing up.
http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm
"The rising moon was misinterpreted as a missile attack during the early days of long-range radar."

Then don't read this.

1) I am not dismissing morals and ethics

Yes, you are. You say, "Regardless of the morals and ethics, the bottom line is its good skilled and technical jobs for America." There is no way to parse that sentence that is not a dismissal of morals and ethics.

2) LOL slavery does not equal perfectly legal industry and rights-abiding jobs. Plus, young one, slavery was not a "job." ..Even though a tomato is a fruit, you don't put it in fruit salad.

Slavery created many jobs -- slave auctioneer, sailor on a slave ship, fugitive slave catcher, slave overseer, whip maker, chain forger. It was a perfectly legal industry at the time.

Creating weapons of terror is not a "rights-abiding job", as all people have the right to live free from the threat of violence.

Given the /. demographics, odds are very good that I should be calling you "young one" rather than the other way around, not that it matters. And while I like a good non sequitur as much as anyone, what do tomatoes in fruit salads have to do with creating weapons of mass destruction?

3) I realize a lot of you don't know this, but the Iraq war started before 2003. It started in 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

I was marching against that war when I was in college, thank you, so I remember it well. Iraq was not developing nukes when we attacked in 2001. Perhaps you didn't get the news that the evidence of that was faked?

There is no reason to have the countries that already have nukes to give them up as long as we have ours to serve as a deterrence.

The U.S., Russia, the U.K. France, and China have a treaty obligation under the NNPT to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." We cannot reasonably ignore our obligation under the NNPT to work for disarmament which at the same time citing the NNPT as the legal basis for threatening Iran. Nor can we effectively engage in negotiations to convince non-nuclear nations to stay that way while our line is "do as I say, not as I do."

The real challenge is going to be IFF software - how do you judge a civilian from a combatant, or one side's soldiers from the other?

Have the robot visually detect stuff pointed at it.

Fire ONE warning shot in the air.

See if people scatter (AWAY from the robot).

If they don't, OPEN FIRE ON THEM! (Or if they throw stuff at it [could be grenades and not rocks])

(Doesn't acount for hidden snipers with RPGs though.)

Money and firearms are the TRUE language of this world. Just about everybody respects them regardless of language or culture.

Feel free to poke holes in my simple combat AI. My approach doesn't need to waste time (or memory storage capacity) trying to identify a weapon someone is pointing at it.

But seriously, the 'combat waldo' concept is enough for modern, 'high-tech' warfare -- ED-209 in ROBOCOP (1987) proved an armed, autonomous robot going haywire can lead to disaterous results to those operating/using them against the enemy.

In other words, when it comes to warfare, keep people 'in the loop'. This is done at the highest level with nuclear missile command and control to prevent what happened in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) and what almost happened in WarGames (1983) from ACTUALLY happening. Even then, there were several 'close calls'

Related links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_warfare

Its easy to look back in hindsight and say how it is, but back then things were different. The fire bombing raids on Japan already killed hundreds of thousands, and General Groves opposed the nuke because he felt that "the effect would not be sufficiently distinct from our regular air force [bombing] program."

Estimates of damage were approximated at 1/10 to 1/2 of the actual damage, not counting subsequent radiation damage.

I suppose if they knew the actual damage that could have been caused, they could have dropped the bomb on somewhere unpopulated after warning the Japanese that they'd use it on their cities if they didn't surrender. The Japanese already were wanting an end to the war as seen by the resignation of Prime Minister Koiso and his cabinet. If the US hadn't demanded unconditional surrender, the war may well have ended earlier and without the use of nukes at all.

Estimates of casualties due to the bombs were 200,000 people. During the fighting, that's about 2 months worth of lives lost. However, the firebombing of Tokyo cost roughly 100,000 lives, so the nuke was effectively more a psychological weapon than one used to kill (otherwise the conventional bombing raids would have had the same effect)

Modern cockroaches have been around for 140 million years.
They are so well adapted that they live in practically every corner of this planet.
Yet... they have never formed a civilization, culture, or means of communication with other species.

The paper talks about communicative civilizations, capable of interstellar communication or at least capable of sending an interstellar of sufficient power and duration for another communicative civilization with similar capabilities to hear it.

Signals DO get lost in the noise over time. Civilizations CAN go extinct.
Hell... we had excellent chances to wipe ourselves out through a nuclear apocalypse dozens of times already.
It is a god damn miracle we are still around when you look at that list. And we came up with that one 64 years ago.
At the same time, we have been actively listening for extraterrestrial signals for only 49 years.
For a signal coming over a single form of communication.

We had entire 15 years to simply stop existing without even trying to listen if there is someone out there.
Signals deteriorate. Civilizations go extinct.

1. Each State Party undertakes not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion, and to prohibit and prevent any such nuclear explosion at any place under its jurisdiction or control.

2. Each State Party undertakes, furthermore, to refrain from causing, encouraging, or in any way participating in the carrying out of any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.

This prevents any government department, agency, or quango using NPP (section 1), or any University or private corporation receiving government support (section 2), and the Non-Proliferation treaty would greatly restrict the ability of an NGO to provide the nuclear explosives, since these would be virtually indistinguishable from a large tactical nuclear weapon. Furthermore, the Partial Test Ban Treaty almost certainly forbids the use of NPP, also in article I, which states:

1. Each of the Parties to this Treaty undertakes to prohibit, to prevent, and not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion, at any place under its jurisdiction or control: (a) in the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer space; or under water, including territorial waters or high seas; or
(b) in any other environment if such explosion causes radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the State under whose jurisdiction or control such explosion is conducted. < snip>

2. Each of the Parties to this Treaty undertakes furthermore to refrain from causing, encouraging, or in any way participating in, the carrying out of any nuclear weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion, anywhere which would take place in any of the environments described, or have the effect referred to, in paragraph 1 of this Article.

I don't set what all the fuss is about. Any time you say nuke or nuclear everyone thinks it is the end of the world. Sheez that is the same reason the NMRI was change to MRI, people hear the word and run the other direction. Just looking at this http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclea r-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused -nuclear-war.htm of past incidents this seems very minor. I know we broke treaty on accident, but that is all. Oh yeah we need to keep the nukes around so when the doomsday asteroid comes we can blow it up into a million little pieces.

Although these were a very solid twenty mishaps that almost lead to nuclear war, why are they all tied to the U.S. & Russia?

You're misrepresenting this a little bit. That article is specifically discussing incidents between the US & the Soviet Union/Russia.

The US and Soviet Union are the only two countries which had enough nuclear power to destroy the world, following the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Frankly, the India/Pakistan development of a nuclear arsenol worries me more than what happened historically between the U.S. & Russia.

Combined, the US and the Soviet Union had 60,000 nuclear weapons-- enough to destroy the entire world a dozen times over.

India & Pakistan will never be allowed to develop an arsenal of that magnitude. Compare the size of the arsenals today.

I think you are correct to fear nuclear proliferation in India & Pakistan, as I think they are more likely to use the weapons. However, the world will not end if India & Pakistan use their weapons. We will suffer, but the world would not end.

Although these were a very solid twenty mishaps that almost lead to nuclear war, why are they all tied to the U.S. & Russia?

You're misrepresenting this a little bit. That article is specifically discussing incidents between the US & the Soviet Union/Russia.

The US and Soviet Union are the only two countries which had enough nuclear power to destroy the world, following the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Frankly, the India/Pakistan development of a nuclear arsenol worries me more than what happened historically between the U.S. & Russia.

Combined, the US and the Soviet Union had 60,000 nuclear weapons-- enough to destroy the entire world a dozen times over.

India & Pakistan will never be allowed to develop an arsenal of that magnitude. Compare the size of the arsenals today.

I think you are correct to fear nuclear proliferation in India & Pakistan, as I think they are more likely to use the weapons. However, the world will not end if India & Pakistan use their weapons. We will suffer, but the world would not end.

"It's interesting to know that there are people who even justify dropping an atomic bomb."

Considering what we knew at the time during world war II, I would say there are probably some would justify dropping the bomb back then (and not just one, but two). I am not sure if I would "justify" it, but I certainly would not unequivically condemn it either, considering what we knew about "The Bomb" back then and the circumstances of the War at the time.

If you tool the time to talk to some Veterans (those who are still alive now, anyway) who served in the Pacific Ocean nearing the end of World War II, you would know the following:

* Emperor Hirohito had no real command or influence over the the Japanese Army, the Generals were fully in charge and answerable to no one but each other
* Japan was the last major holdout to victory for the United States in WWII. Hitler's Army (or what was left of it) had already capitulated, but the Japanese were still "recruiting" boys who could barely see over the cockpit to die for their country in Kamakazi flights that had become less and less effective as the US Navy learned to adapt to it during the War.
* Despite increasing losses, Japan showed little sign of surrendering (to save it's Honor). As the US military came closer to mainland Japanese soil, island by island, the Japanese Army fought tooth and nail to make the US pay for each step it took.
* In considering wether or not to drop "The Bomb," President Truman, with the advice and assistance of the Army, took a good hard look at how many American (and to some extent Japanese) lives would be lost if the US had to press all the way to the mainland and deep into the Heart of Japan to force a surrender. Seeing the numbers, he ultimately gave the go-ahead.
* Even after Hiroshima was completely destroyed, it took the Destruction of Nagasaki days later to force what then became a U.S. Demand for an unconditional surrender.

So all in all, if you asked the average American citizen what they thought of the matter, many might - like you imply, say it was the single greatest mistake the United States ever made.

But if you ask a WWII Vet who served in the pacific, you might get some different feelings.

Anyway, I would suggest you do some more research at the following site, for example, before you make such statements in the future without backup: http://www.nuclearfiles.org/hitimeline/1945.html.

The history books I've read have a slightly different take on things. Not everyone agrees the bombing was a necessary thing. Japan was already in the middle of negotiating a surrender. The bombs were dropped at least partially to force surrender before the Russians could be involved.

Look at the quotes from men who were involved:

"P.M. [Churchill} & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace." -President Harry S. Truman

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives." -Dwight Eisenhower

"Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of 'face'... It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

Is it necessary to call the parent stupid just because you disagree?

Let's see...an average modern 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant produces 500 pounds of plutonium (useful material) and 30 metric tons (33 US tons) of high-grade radioactive waste per year. This material is all solid or liquid in nature, making it relatively easy to contain.

Most US electricity is generated by burning coal. A modern coal-burning power plant produces about 3000 metric tons of nitrogen oxides, 1700 metric tons of sulfur dioxide, and about 70 metric tons of sulfuric acid, along with about 1000 metric tons of "particulate matter" (ash?). This material is released directly into the atmosphere.

Which one would you rather have?

BTW, I used liberal-left pro-environmental anti-anything-that-might-possibly-pollute-at-all sites for my info here, so you can probably call those "worst-case" numbers for both nukes and coal. My father worked as a mechanical maintenance procedures developer for a nuclear plant in Louisiana for years; before that he was a senior maintenance mechanic. Nuclear plant maintenance is so anal about things that they have a torque specification for every screw, nut, and bolt in the building - probably even the bolts holding down the toilets in the restrooms. Those specs must be approved by the NRC, and every time a wrench is turned the person who does so has to file paperwork stating (under penalty of perjury) what he did and how he did it, down to the aforementioned torque values on every screw/nut/bolt, etc. etc. etc.

France has been relying on nuclear energy for decades. It pains me to say this, but maybe this is an area where we should follow the French example.

Also check out the links to the other sources provided on that page.

Somewhat related - and very interesting - is this narrative of the B-52 accident at the Thule airbase in Greenland in 1968.

Hyper-focus? I have no idea what you mean. I simply made note of apparent misunderstanding on your part and then used that to question the validity of your conclusion. Perhaps you're being a little hyper-sensative?

By the way, just to be clear. After much study and thought I have found that there is no perfectly safe, or even acceptably safe method of building nuclear power plants on earth.

I do agree designs are better. Are they perfect? Hardly. Every engineer will tell you there's no such thing as a perfect system. For example, the nuclear power industry tried quite hard from the get go to build "safe" reactors, Here is the result:

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/hitimeline/nwa/index.h tml
http://www.ieer.org/reports/accident.html
http://www.ccnr.org/CANDU_Safety.html
http://www.lbl.gov/nsd/education/ABC/wallchart/cha pters/15/7.html
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/cndscot/trisaf/ch4.ht m
http://www.clemson.edu/ep/radiat3.htm
http://www.sea-us.org.au/no2reactor/rr-oops.html

Once you've read through as many studies on operator error in control rooms as I have, then we can talk. In the interm, perhaps you should trust me when I say, it can't safely be done.

As well, the economics are not as good as you've been led to believe. See:

Nuclear Power is Uneconomical

Since its beginning, nuclear power has cost this country over $492,000,000,000 -- nearly twice the cost of the Viet Nam War and the Apollo Moon Missions combined. In return for this investment, we have an energy source that, until the mid-1980's, gave us less energy in this country than did the burning of firewood! In the U.S., nuclear power contributes only 20-22% of our electricity, and only 8-10% of our total energy consumption. In Illinois these percentages are much greater due to Commonwealth Edison's over-reliance on nuclear power.

Since 1950, nuclear power has received over $97,000,000,000 in direct and indirect subsidies from the federal government, such as deferred taxes, artificially low limits on liability in case of nuclear accidents, and fuel fabrication write-offs. No other industry has enjoyed such privilege.

According to a recent study conducted by the Citizens Utility Board, Commonwealth Edison's customers now pay the highest electric bills in the Midwest, due primarily to the over-reliance on nuclear power plants.

Many costs for nuclear power have been deliberately underestimated by government and industry such as the costs for the permanent disposal of nuclear wastes, the "decommissioning" (shutting-down and cleaning-up) of retired nuclear power plants, and nuclear accident consequences. In January, 1994, Commonwealth Edison acknowledged that it had to nearly double its estimate for reactor decommissioning -- from $2.3 billion to as much as $4.1 billion!
http://www.neis.org/literature/Brochures/npfacts.h tm

That map is interesting but this one is even more interesting.

The map is misleading. The radiation doses are affected much more so by elevation than fallout, for most of the country.
Just look at the whole coastline and southern border. Low doses because of low elevation.
Montana and Idaho are high obviously due to the Rocky Mountains.

That map is interesting but this one is even more interesting. It is the total fallout for the US, by county, over the entire continental atmospheric testing period. The doses are somewhat high in places, but not outrageously so when you consider it is summed over a period of ~20(?) or so years. The site nuclearfiles.org is obviously grossly biased but this section of it is absolutely fascinating. It contains I-131 fallout maps for justa about every aboveground test done in the US.

That map is interesting but this one is even more interesting. It is the total fallout for the US, by county, over the entire continental atmospheric testing period. The doses are somewhat high in places, but not outrageously so when you consider it is summed over a period of ~20(?) or so years. The site nuclearfiles.org is obviously grossly biased but this section of it is absolutely fascinating. It contains I-131 fallout maps for justa about every aboveground test done in the US.

True. A lot of extremely gifted scientists were executed or expelled. It makes you wonder how the world wouldve turned out if this man hadnt fled for his life to the US.

______________________

Promote ethnic cleansing in Palestine and censorship of the American press

3,000,000,000 American Dollars cant be wrong.

Sponsor an Israeli occupier today!

.. MAD factor in?

MAD = Mutually Assured Destruction

I personally don't want to run BSD, do you?

Brief overview of a proposal in front of the UN to ban all space-based weaponry which the US is actively part of.

This, the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament treaties, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, and the landmine treaty. Doesn't the US have ANY respect left for other countries let alone their own integrity? This is just getting disgusting.

Actually, it was coined by the New York Times.

No, it's an actual technical term that refers to a useful concept when discussing the effects on the ground of air-burst explosions.

From The United States Strategic Bombing Survey The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Chairman's Office, 30 June 1946:

For convenience, the term "ground zero" will be used to designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation, or "air zero.")

I see you're an optimist. The world has come painfully close to nuclear war more than most people would care to know.

I wouldn't be suprised if there was radioactive waste at the bottom of the sea somewhere. And this is off the top of my head w/out even looking.

Here you go.

I also remember reading something about a US bomber crashing in the ocean which prompted other nations to ban the flying of nuclear armed planes over their land. Ahhh, found this through google too. A very interesting read.

And these are just the accidents. There's also the intentional stuff (testing) to also take into account.

Limited success was achieved with the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater and in space. However, neither France nor China, both nuclear weapon States, signed the PTBT.

Um, why do you think North Korea started "squealing" in the first place? If a cowboy in charge of the largest military in the world put me on his list of targets (the "Axis of Evil") and then proceeded to invade the first country on that list, I would sure as hell start building some weapons of deterence. The surest way to avoid a forced "regime change" is to have nukes within distance of Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo.

And it's not like North Korea broke any international laws (unlike, possibly, the US): the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty includes "the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events...have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country." (Article X.1)

There have been instances of nukes getting dropped (odd, Sandia Labs deleted the link, hrrm thank you Google) and blown out of silos without ever detonating. They are quite hardy devices.

Read This Link for more hair-raising stories.

For a good laugh, search Google for "nuclear bomb silo explosion wrench" and see the helpful ads on the side of the page.

how do you explain a nuclear weapon with no fallout and radioactivity?

I do not advocate or support this theory about port chicago being a nuclear explosion at all but what about a Neutron Bomb?. Granted they weren't even thought of till 1958 but... Shrug.

...maybe we could just lock in the coordinates on our freight transporter and teleport it directly into the sun. You're thinking 1000 years, not 100. Think of what we have accomplished in the past 100 years and stop being ridiculously optimistic.

Throughout the Iran/Iraq war, it wasn't nuclear bomb dropping tactics that the US was teaching the Iraqi army. The world's fourth-largest standing army at that time was learning conventional military techniques from the Americans.

Somehow I think Saddam won't exactly spend a week dropping letters over the city he's about to bomb, letting them know he's coming. Somehow I don't think government is going to make everyone stay in the city. Think I'm full of crap?

India and Pakistan are in a MAD situation, as are Israel and all of Arabia. Even Saddam Hussein didn't use his weapons of mass destruction in the (2nd) Gulf War, because he knew the answer would be devastating.

Bush however thinks nobody can touch the US (as if 9/11 didn't prove that to be an illusion). Planing to use nuclear arms as tactical weapons or against non-(semi-)Superpowers goes against the MAD principle (as does that silly anti-missile system).

If anyone can do such simulations in realtime at home in 2050, then one possible outcome has to be that any government or large organization or wealthy individual can fairly easily design (and then make) such devices -- or ones even more advanced (smaller, easier to assemble, etc.). Einstein warned, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." My feeling is one way to transcend the threat of everyone being able to quickly destroy using nuclear or other weapons is to create the means where everyone can create even faster than, just like duckweed in a pond keeps growing even as fast as ducks eat it. That means true defense requires a sustained investment in advanced manufacturing technology and organizing manufacturing knowledge(including self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.) We must accept that such things aren't pipe dreams -- they are absolute necessities (as is a simultaneous focus on reducing the causes of war such as injustice, want, and ignorance).

I don't mind spending money on defense -- I just want to see the money spent well on defending against true threats to human survival -- want, ignorance, injustice, corruption, "love of money", and weapons of mass destruction (whoever controls them at the moment -- like the Russian Mafia?). We are over 50 years beyond the creation of nuclear weapons; the defense department should be willing to think at least another 50 years ahead. The defense department is instructed by Congress to win wars and in the long term this strategy will fail because of technological amplification swamping the biosphere's capacity to support humans (such as through Moore's law leading to every home computer being a nuclear weapons design station in 2050 or sooner). I want to see a defense department that learns how to transcend wars and thus be able to truly defend all of humanity.

Would not it take at least as much courage to transcend wars as to win them? Our armed forces have no short supply of courage, and so perhaps there is hope.

One of the problems with this sort of weapons design work is it is too exciting for technically minded people to easily resist doing it. See for example: Ted Taylor: Confessions of a nuclear weapons design addict. We need alternative technical projects that are even more exciting and cost even more (shameless plug for OSCOMAK!)

Of course, according to Moravec and Kurzweil and Vinge, AI will be rampant before then and we will be passing through the AI singularity -- another cause for hope or despair about transcending nuclear war depending on your perspective.

I was not referring to what the US Government does to bar its own citisens from downloading inside the borders of the USA. I wast trying to make the point that the US: Does not seem to like other countries trying to stop US citisens from breaking foreign laws from inside the US but might not be as thrilled at other countries taking that same stance.

I ask the question:

Would the US be equally thrilled as it is about enabling its citisens to go unpunished while selling contraband to other countries if other countries followed the USA's example and refused to stop their citisens from breaking US laws by selling contraband to US citisens from inside the borders of said foreign countries?

The lets face it, contrary to popular beleif, the USA has just like the rest of the world a long and distinguished history of "Expecting to be able to freely do unto others whatever it wants but getting pissed off when others do the same unto the US".

Tactical nukes are definitely not ruled out at this point, especially if this anthrax thing in Florida is linked to the terrorists.

The United States lumps together nuclear, chemical and biological agents as "weapons of mass destruction." Technically, the U.S. would be in accordance with its policy on 'first use,' if it used nukes now. If the anthrax incident can be traced to terrorists, then it becomes even more likely that the dust will be blown off our stockpile of battlefield nukes.

~Philly

Engineers, wake up. You are responsible for your inventions, and you have to live with the moral consequences of those inventions. This is exactly what Bill Joy was trying to tell us. Robert Oppenheimer employed 5,000 people to build his bomb, and after it was employed against Japanese civilians he declared to Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands." To the engineers building the bomb, it was a neat hack. They did not question the moral implications of the device until it was proven. If you build something that you expect to change the world, don't snivel about your "overwhelming feelings of guilt". Either accept the moral implications of your invention or don't build it.

but it could be said to sound like the use of nuclear weapons has not been ruled out.

That is correct.

I know the United States has a long-standing 'no first use' policy

No the US has not, compared for example to the PRC's policy. See http://www.nuclearfiles.org/docs/1995/950406-p5.ht ml

--Seen

It doesn't matter how many we can destroy before they hit us, because when we strike back, and we WILL strike back, it will eventually come back to us in the form of nuclear radation. Here's a map for ya, and some more info on the effects of a nuclear bomb here

Your point that MAD is "Un-American" is completely untrue. I personally believe in Mutally Assured Destruction. My opinion is an American one because I can be proud say it out loud, cause that's what Americans do